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Timequake
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Read Timequake

Timequake (1997) (edit title/settings)

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

According to science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur in New York City on February 13th, 2001, where the Earth decides to back up a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will.

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(from book jacket)
On February 13th, 2001, according to Vonnegut, the universe will tire momentarily of expanding forever. What's the point? Maybe it would be more fun to shrink for a change, and have a reunion of all the stuff back where it began. Then it could make a great big BANG... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

(from book jacket)
On February 13th, 2001, according to Vonnegut, the universe will tire momentarily of expanding forever. What's the point? Maybe it would be more fun to shrink for a change, and have a reunion of all the stuff back where it began. Then it could make a great big BANG again.
It will shrink back to February 17th, 1991, but will then decide that expansion is the way to go after all. As time marches on once more to 2001, though, Vonnegut and Trout and everybody else and everything else will have to do exactly what they did the first time through the decade, for good or ill: marry the wrong person, bet on the wrong horse. Whatever! Ten years of deja vu all over again! But all hell cuts loose when the rerun is over and free will kicks in again. Everybody is so used to being a robot of the past that almost nobody is prepared to think of new things to do and then do them, in order to avoid accidents or whatever. Off-balance pedestrians will fall down and not get back up. Unsteered motor vehicles will slay them by the millions. Factory workers will allow themselves to be gobbled up by their own machinery!
Hero of the moment? Kilgore Trout!

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “…The Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?”
  • “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
    Quote from son Mark Vonnegut, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax player…
  • “I would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in.”
  • “I’m wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.”
  • “Physicists must, from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • “There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”
    Highlighted by 8 Kindle customers
  • Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • “Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.”
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.
    Highlighted by 5 Kindle customers
  • Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • Henry David Thoreau said most famously, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • “If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
  • They say the first thing to go when you’re old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn’t true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.
    Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers
Show all 15 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

Call me Junior.

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

  • Determinism: Vonnegut uses the premise of a timequake (or repetition of actions) in which there is no free will. The idea of determinism is explored -- as it is in many of his previous works -- to assert that people really have no free will. Kilgore Trout serves again as the main character. Vonnegut explains in the beginning of the book that he was not satisfied with the original version of Timequake he wrote (or Timequake One). So, he took parts of Timequake One and combined it with personal thoughts and anecdotes to make the finished product, so-called Timequake Two. Many of the anecdotes deal with Vonnegut's family, the death of loved ones, and people's last words. (From Wikipedia)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Putnam
Country: U.S.A.
Publication Date: 1997
ISBN: 0-399-13737-8
Page Count: 219

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PS3572.O5 T56 1997
  • Dewey: 813/.54 21

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